I'm the One Who Got Away Read online

  Five Flashes of Teeth

  1

  LIKE A CATHOLIC PRIEST WITH A DIRECT LINE TO GOD, for many years my mother was my only conduit to my father—the interpreter of his handsomeness, his viciousness, his cockiness. We’ll call him Nick, though that is not his real name.

  When they met, Nick never told my mother he wanted to be famous. Perhaps back then he didn’t even know it himself. But his need to be loved—as clichéd as that sounds—all but preordained it. And nature was on his side. Indeed, I once read in a movie magazine that for a male star to be truly handsome he needed four things: a large head, good teeth, a deep philtrum (those two lines between your nose and lips), and a cleft chin. My father had them all.

  The first time I saw him on television, I was seven. My mother and I were living in a little apartment near UCLA. During a commercial on Marcus Welby, M.D., she whispered, “It’s Nick.”

  She said his name with a Did you see that? incredulity, as if a coyote had just crept out of one of the nearby canyons and flitted by our window. A coyote—or maybe a wolf.

  I had less than thirty seconds to study the man catching a blonde’s Ultra Brite kiss. But for years after that toothpaste commercial, I kept an eye out for my father’s cleft chin and brown eyes. I would say to my mother, “Is that him?” pointing at the television. I could never be sure. I had to rely on her to lean in close, her head next to mine to direct my line of sight as if to say, There, look, there he is. And sure enough, then I could see him. He was the corrupt businessman on Charlie’s Angels, the detective who got shot on a two-part Police Woman, the city politician on The Rockford Files.

  2

  Once, when my mother read an essay I’d written, she asked, “How did you know our Impala was burgundy?” I didn’t know how to answer. Did she tell me, or did I just guess because of course burgundy would have been the color they chose? I’d heard some of the details of their life together, turning them over in my child’s mind when my mother and her friends smoked and sipped from pink cans of Tab and talked about men and failed marriages and self-improvement. On those occasions, I would stay very still so the women would forget I was there, playing beside the couch, listening. For years, my parents’ movie played on the screen of my mind: the car pulling up, my father—her co-star—behind the wheel.

  Nick dropped out of college around the same time his family relocated from Texas to my mother’s small Colorado town. She was sixteen. He was twenty, all swagger and audacity—the older brother of the new kid at her high school. Nick was the firstborn in a family of five, the black sheep and golden boy in one. After losing his University of Arizona football scholarship because of an injury, he moved into his parents’ new house, commandeering the best bedroom for himself. He spent his days ordering his brothers around, eating his mother’s home cooking, and considering his next move. As it turned out, his next move was my mother.

  Despite the college scholarships she’d already lined up— she wanted to be a photojournalist or a graphic artist—she accepted the tiny diamond engagement ring he gave her for Christmas. “He was the most exciting person I’d ever met,” she has told me. “Man, woman, child, or beast—it didn’t matter—he could make you his.”

  My mother suspects her parents consented to the marriage mostly because they were afraid she was pregnant. She wasn’t, and to prove it she asked her mother to take in the waists of all her skirts and dresses, reassuring her parents and silencing the school gossips. On a January morning a few months before her seventeenth birthday, she walked down the aisle with Nick.

  Mere weeks after the wedding, he took her away from her friends and family. The newlyweds left Colorado, moving first to Texas, where she knew no one and he knew everyone, and then to Las Vegas. Nick got a job selling advertising for the Las Vegas Sun. With his winning smile, he could sell anything.

  In a town chockablock with fame, my father began to taste the possibility of his own. As successful as he was, he’d never seen himself as a nine-to-fiver. Feeling he was destined for bigger things, he learned quickly how to sidle up to Frank Sinatra’s big table and get invited to sit down. He had a talent for schmoozing with Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin. Soon his best buddy was Lindsay Crosby, Bing’s son.

  Even today, years after I first heard the story of my parents’ meeting, I feel a pull in my gut—a place right at the top of my ribcage—a what if tug of regret for my mother. What if she hadn’t met him by those bleachers that day at Montezuma-Cortez High School, home of the Panthers. What if?

  As a kid, hearing her story, knowing what came after, I always wanted to scream at her the way you do when a character in a horror film starts down the stairs into a dark basement.

  But my mother’s teenage self never heard my warnings. Growing up, I asked her many times why she went with him so willingly and why her parents let her go. The answers I got—“Things were different then. People got married younger”— never satisfied me. I understood that “wife” rather than “photojournalist” must have sounded like the safer choice in 1959. But I expected someone as smart as my mother to be, well, smarter. I wanted my mother’s teenage self to see the writing on the wall. More than anything, I wanted her to resist my father’s charms.

  3

  The night Nick turned twenty-two, his childhood friend TJ brought several buddies and their wives and girlfriends from Texas to Vegas to celebrate. Arriving at the Sands Hotel, the men wore white dinner jackets, while my mother and the other women wore silk and organza dresses. They headed to a reserved table near the dance floor as Nick worked the room, smiling and waving.

  Still, he kept an eye on my mother. He always knew exactly where she was. He looked over at the precise moment one of TJ’s friends moved to pull out her chair for her. My mother didn’t want the guy to hold her chair. She knew better.

  In seconds, Nick was by her side. “Hey, partner,” he said to the interloper. They stood side by side behind my mother’s chair. Nick put a hand on the guy’s back. “Thanks so much for keeping an eye out for her.” He said it smoothly, so there was no gauging his mood.

  “Don’t mention it,” TJ’s friend said.

  “I should be shot, huh? Leaving a beauty like this all alone.” Nick laughed.

  My mother said, “Let’s all sit down, why don’t we?”

  Nick gave her that pursed-lip smile of his, but his eyes were hard and he was thinking.

  “She is a beauty, too. Don’t you think?” He traced one finger along her bare shoulder.

  My mother willed TJ’s friend, who was still standing there, not to say anything, not to take the bait. But he did. Turning to face my father, he smiled and said, “You don’t want to leave her alone too long.”

  The smile is what set Nick off. He jabbed his finger into the guy’s chest so hard his shoulder jerked back. TJ stood up. “Nick, come on.” But my father never listened to TJ when they were kids. Why would he now?

  “You looking to get it wet?” he said, jabbing his finger again.

  “Whoa, buddy. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Oh, now I’m your buddy? Seems more like you want to be my wife’s buddy.”

  The bouncers at the door were watching now.

  “Let’s just sit,” my mother said as the three of them stood in a little cluster around her chair.

  “You want to sit with this limp dick? You thinking about that?”

  “Please,” she said. “Everyone’s looking.”

  “Is that what you care about?” My father smiled, a glimmer of white teeth between his lips. Then he raised his arms as if he was feeling rain from the sky. He turned in a full circle and bowed, relishing making a scene. He pressed closer to my mother. She could feel his pant leg rub against her stockings, his breath in her ear. “I thought it was this limp dick you cared about.”

  Taking a step back, he shoved her chair into the backs of her knees so she lost her balance and sat down hard. Then he took his seat beside her. The band began to play. Couples moved to the
dance floor. My mother did not meet the eyes of the others at the table, and they knew better than to look her way. Nick draped his arm around her shoulder. She could feel him keeping time to the music, one foot tapping.

  4

  Beyond beauty and intelligence, even at sixteen my mother had an Olympian’s dedication to hard work. Employers spotted this right away. The Nevada Club, an upscale casino, hired her as an assistant bookkeeper. When she first started working at the club, she didn’t know anything about gambling. From the casino’s reports, she learned how the games worked—chuck-a-luck, 21, and Baccarat.

  The Nevada Club catered to a better class of customer than many of the casinos, but the alley running between the club’s office and the casino was a dumping ground for mob hits. After police found one too many bodies there, the casino posted guards in the alley. Those guards escorted my mother and the other secretaries as they carried check signature plates and money across the alley to the casino’s safe. These guards would look the other way when my mother lingered in the casino to play a few rounds of blackjack. Even though she was underage, the dealers didn’t question her. Maybe they knew a pretty woman would attract more players to the table. Or maybe they detected the black eyes she covered with makeup and took pity on her.

  Either way, in the end it would be my mother’s industriousness and talent for gambling—along with my father’s lust for fame—that allowed her to escape.

  One of the ways Nick held a tight rein on his wife was to keep her isolated from her family and friends. They’d been married for almost three years when I was born. During those years, he’d allowed her to see her parents only a handful of times. But just before my first birthday, he relaxed his rule.

  My father had a plan to save rent money for the summer by sending my mother and me to live with her parents while he moved in with Lindsay Crosby. My mother went along with his scheme, knowing that as soon as we left, he and Lindsay were headed to Miami to do as they pleased. She knew it wasn’t a break from rent he wanted but rather a vacation from married life. Not that marriage had stopped him from doing what he liked anyway. Twice he’d told her to go to the doctor to see if he’d given her gonorrhea.

  But now she didn’t care, because she had a plan of her own.

  By then her parents had left Colorado and moved to Fresno, a city in California’s Central Valley. Her blackjack stash had grown. When Nick put us on that little plane, he had no idea that my mother had already shipped several boxes of her things to her parents’ house. He had no idea she intended to leave him for good.

  My grandparents lived in a brand new house and had a bedroom waiting for us. They’d planted gardenias, my mother’s favorite flower, by the front door. During those first few months when she thought we’d really gotten away, safety smelled like those gardenias. In my mother’s mind, the flower’s perfume was linked to the sound of her key turning in her parents’ front door as she arrived home from her new job.

  While my grandmother cared for me, my mother and grandfather went off to work. The three of them reunited for dinner each day much like they’d done when my mother was a girl. The motorized garage door would signal my grandfather’s arrival home from his trucking business. Before entering the house, he would leave his shoes by the back door. It was the early 1960s and all the men wore hard, lace-up shoes and dark socks of ribbed nylon, ankle or knee length.

  In his stocking feet, my grandfather would pad into the living room. Exhausted from rising before dawn to supervise his crew of truckers and mechanics, he’d settle into his leather recliner. Pushing back, his feet rose on the footrest. That’s when I, a toddler playing nearby, would start screaming. My grandmother and mother would hurry in from the kitchen where they’d been making dinner. A spatula or tasting spoon still in one hand, one of them would scoop me up, desperate to comfort me, but unable to determine the source of my distress.

  At last, they solved the mystery: my grandfather’s socks. Back in the apartment Nick and my mother shared in Las Vegas, from my vantage point—a crawling baby on the floor— I must only have seen my father’s feet and his dark socks each time he came for her, jealous again, raging again, beating her again.

  5

  All summer, my mother had maintained the fiction that she and I were going back to Vegas in the fall. Nick had been calling her from the road—Miami, Texas, and Mexico, where he and Lindsay were following a matador friend on the bullfighting circuit. But toward the end of August, she finally broke the news that she wasn’t coming back.

  Suddenly, he was desperate to have her. He began calling her dozens of times a day, screaming, pleading, putting Lindsay on the line to talk “sense” to her. This went on for days until he said: “I’ll kill myself. Do you want that on your head?” My grandparents blocked his calls after that.

  There was nothing left for Nick to do but get on a plane to Fresno.

  When my mother would tell the story of his arrival in California, she’d close her eyes, shivering at the memory of his scent. She’d caught a whiff of Nick’s lingering cologne in the elevator of her office building on her way back from lunch. “My instinct is still to throw up from fear,” she’d tell me. She’d known he would come for her, which may have made it worse when what she feared actually happened. Stepping out of the elevator, an uneaten tuna sandwich on toast in a little bag by her side, she felt sure that he was waiting for her by her desk. Sweat began to bead along her spine, dampening her bra and dress. I would try to imagine what Canoe cologne smelled like. I would see her pressing the elevator button again, turning around and heading home.

  He had been there. When she didn’t come back to her desk after lunch that day, Nick drove to her parents’ house, parking down the block. He watched and waited until my grandparents left. Once my mother was alone, he stood on the grass in the front yard, calling her name. She hid on the floor of her bedroom, huddling over me and trying to keep me quiet. When she didn’t answer, he circled the house, jiggling the door handles and windows, searching for a way to get in.

  The neighborhood was new and isolated, the houses far apart. “You never knew what he would do,” my mother has said. “I kept waiting for him to smash one of the windows.”

  “I know you’re in there,” he called. He pressed his face to the sliding glass door, cupping his big hands to create shade, trying to see inside. “Let me in,” he said like the Big Bad Wolf. “Let me in.”

  He yelled and banged on the door for nearly an hour. Finally the police arrived. A neighbor must have called them. They didn’t arrest my father, but they told him to move along.

  He came back the next day but this time my grandfather was ready. A soldier and a man who’d kept crews of oil workers and truck drivers in line, he confronted my father and threatened to call the police again and have him arrested. Perhaps like an animal that grows bored when its prey climbs high into a tree, or perhaps simply to tally his losses and regroup, Nick retreated. But back in Vegas he continued hounding my mother, vacillating between sending flowers and threatening telegrams. She was in the midst of filing for divorce, anticipating an ugly battle, when her luck turned.

  Frank Sinatra was filming a new movie and he had a part for my father. Lady in Cement would turn out to be Nick’s big break. By the time a sheriff served him with divorce papers, he must have thought he was on the brink of stardom. Why be saddled with alimony and child support? He was a no-show in divorce court. After a judge granted full custody of me to my mother, she made legal arrangements for my grandmother to be my guardian should anything happen to her. But taking no more chances, she loaded up her new Corvair and set about disappearing into the vastness of Los Angeles. She even changed our last name, thinking that surely then he would never find us.

  “People always said Nick was good-looking,” my mother told me not long ago. “But that’s not what I cared about. That wasn’t it at all. It was the way he carried himself on those long, bowed legs of his. It was his throaty laugh and flash of white teeth that al
ways got me. It was the way he seemed to know all my secrets—not only that, but he found them amusing.” A slight smile crept over her lips when she said this.

  Perhaps if I’d understood from the beginning that even after all she’d been through, even after we escaped and began our new life in L.A., she could still be drawn to my father’s charms, then perhaps I would have understood that the wolf would always be at our door.

  Miracle Mile

  IT WAS LUNCHTIME ON THE MIRACLE MILE—A STRETCH of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles that’s not quite downtown and not quite the West Side. My mother walked beside me in her crisp linen dress. Beneath the linen, her stockings and slip made a fft fft shifting sound, keeping time to the click of her slingback pumps. Heat waves bent the air. Pedestrians hurried from one air-conditioned building to the next, emptying the streets. Streets that had civilized what was once ice, then tar pits, then desert. All had made way for the City of Angels.

  Beside my mother, I was office appropriate in a banana yellow cotton skirt and top combo. I was eleven and it was 1973, when all the clothes were Laffy Taffy colors.

  From elementary school through high school, I spent my summers working with my mother, who was a secretary in a lawyer’s office. Lunchtime was the highlight of my day. On that particular day, at my request, we were headed past the office towers and the gas station on the corner to the lunch truck for gorditas. I anticipated the greasy scent of the truck and the weight of the silver-wrapped sandwich I would carry back to my mother’s office.