Nothing Left To Want (38 page)

I don’t know why, but after Diana came, I never spent another night at home. Years of being nearly housebound ended abruptly. Maybe it was my fear of ever having to attempt real mothering again, or maybe it was something even less admirable than that. Having a baby made me feel tied down, which in turn made me want to rebel, as though my sweet little girl was some disapproving parent trying to keep me from having fun.

Remembering this makes me feel even sicker than dying does. Anyway, the reason doesn’t matter, the result does, and the result was that I went out every night. If an envelope was being opened at a restaurant or club, I was there.

In the month of February I attended the so-important launch of the Razor Chocolate and then the Verizon launch of the new mirrored phone and two parties that I’m pretty sure were fundraisers for people who didn’t have cell phones.

I went to every hot club on Sunset and waved and smiled and flashed peace signs for the paparazzi, and when they asked me how I liked being a mother, I gave them the dimple and said I’d never been happier in my life.

At almost every stupid event I went to, there was the awful Karmen with a K. Like me, she had too much money and too much time but, unlike me, L.A. was her home turf. And the more I saw of her, the less disgusting I found her and the more I started to admire the confident way she swaggered through the crowds, throwing a grin here and a one-liner there.

If I had been an infamous heiress in New York, she was the girl people loved to hate in L.A.. A self proclaimed lesbian lothario, she ruled the nights in L.A.’s endless ‘have a good time or die trying’ frantic atmosphere. Her filthy mouth and provocative flaunting of her great body and ugly face made her appear differently to me in the context of California’s ‘wilder is better’ attitude.

I liked watching her and trying to be unobtrusive. I would move closer to wherever she was standing. Outside at valet parking I would listen to her bantering with photographers and laugh along with them at her outrageous remarks.

“
Hey, Karmen, what’s up tonight?” She’d toss her one good feature, her long black hair, and say teasingly. “Probably you if you’re looking at me.” They would laugh and snap her picture as she deliberately flashed too much thigh getting in and out of her blood-red Maserati. Inevitably, one night at Green Door, she caught me staring at her. Her black brows arched and she raised her glass to me. Surprised, I raised mine back and gave her what I hoped was a knock-out smile. Maybe it was. She told me later that she fell in love with my dimple first.

Anyway she strode over to me. “Well, Carey Kelleher, here you are, alone again, naturally. Where’s your boss, Milan, tonight?”

I shrugged uncomfortably; banter isn’t my thing. She smiled. “Never mind. I saw you looking at me. What were you thinking?”

I tried to think of something cool to say and instead mumbled. “I was just … I don’t know ... I really like your dress.”

That was a lie. Her dress was some horrible tacky silver metallic thing that barely covered her ass, but she must have bought it, because her next move was fierce. In one motion she sat her drink down beside mine and leaned both arms on the bar, trapping me within her embrace and very slowly leaned forward and pressed her mouth onto mine.

I didn’t react, I didn’t resist. I can’t say I felt much beyond shock but I did like how aggressive she was. I’ve always responded to people who take charge of situations. When she pulled back, she was smiling widely and I decided that she wasn’t ugly, just really different looking.

“
I like your dress too, Carey. I like what’s inside it, I always have, but I didn’t know you played on my team.”

I thought about it. Was I gay? Should I be gay? Would being gay mean not being alone anymore?

I grinned back and tossed down my drink. “I didn’t know I did either.”

She stroked my arm and I shivered, but whether from desire or disgust I’m still not sure. “I hear you adopted a kid, huh?”

I nodded. “Yeah, Diana, she’s beautiful. I really love her.”

Her brown eyes sparkled. “That’s cool. I love kids too. Maybe you’d like to introduce us sometime?”

In a voice that didn’t sound like mine I said, “How about now?”

That’s how we started, and even for lesbian relationships, which are famed for the meet, hook up and then get a U-Haul and move in together, we went fast. Of course we had to move fast because a week after our first hook up, I burned down my house, and when Karmen said Diana and I could stay with her, I said yes because nobody else was offering.

Chapter 40

There’s no way to burn down your house and not come out of the whole thing looking like either a total moron or a total criminal. Despite what some people have said, in the disaster with my pretty house no one accused me of being a criminal, though I think the phrase 'criminally stupid' was thrown around a little bit.

As always, my parents when hearing of anything distressing in my life jumped in with offers of support, support in their case being another FedEx’d envelope filled with more treatment brochures. I have really tried to understand why, when anything bad happened to me, or when I messed up, they immediately jumped on the idea of sending me to treatment.

I did use coke for a year or so when I was twenty and living in New York, and I tried Karmen’s Oxycontin with her a couple of times, but I’m no drug addict and I barely drink since I have diabetes. I don’t much enjoy going into comas and waking up in a pool of my own pee with ambulance attendants staring down at me, though, right now I wouldn’t mind that.

I guess my parents work under the school of thought that its preferable believing I’m a drug addict rather than admitting that I might need help just living, need their help specifically. If I’m a junkie, they are great, involved, supportive folks offering their sad little girl the best treatment money can buy, whereas if I’m not a drug addict, then maybe some of the bad things that happen to me are their fault.

I burnt my beautiful house down by accident. Karmen had spent most of the night with me and, for a while, it had been going pretty good. Karmen really did seem to like Diana, and with someone else there, I felt comfortable enough with my baby to let the nanny take an hour and keep Diana with me in the living room.

I totally loved having a girlfriend who seemed to want to be with me all the time. Of course I understood that Karmen, funny, ballsy, super-confident Karmen, wasn’t just my new girlfriend, she was
my
new girlfriend and I was really trying to make the transition into a gay girl life. I got the calling her 'honey' part down, but choked a little on calling her 'baby', and I wished she would call me anything else but that.

I’ve learned that lesbian relationships move super-fast. There is no first date, you hope they’ll call, and working up to sex scenario. It’s more a hook-up-once-and-you’re-married kind of deal. I know I hadn’t had to work up to sex with Michael, or even some other guys, but I would have liked the time to work up to it with Karmen, and that just wasn’t happening.

The way she saw it, and maybe she was going by the super-secret lesbian handbook, was that we had kissed, we were both single, I obviously wanted her around and that meant we were a couple and couples have sex.

Karmen was usually loaded on one thing or another and that night was no exception. Being drunk made her funny, but she could also turn mean on a dime. Her other drug of choice, Oxycontin, like Rush Limbaugh, usually made her mellow and happy, but it also made her horny as hell and I think we both thought it might help me feel the same way, so a few nights before the fire I had let her crush up a few pills on my coffee table and joined her in snorting up a line.

I got sick, so sick the room spun and I didn’t make it to the bathroom before I threw up. When my knee’s locked, Karmen had caught me and eased me onto the couch. She was so gentle. She washed my face and ran to the refrigerator to get a new insulin pack for my pump, and when I cried and apologized, she kissed me and told me she loved me and that it was all okay, that she was with me.

For me her actions were a zillion times more seductive than the Oxycontin and if I didn’t want her in that way, I did want her to stay with me. It makes me feel pathetic, but after that I felt safe with her.

The first time we made love, I wasn’t a participant, I was just there, but after a few nights she started telling me what she wanted me to do, and I did it. It didn’t matter. I loved going to sleep with her and in the mornings I wasn’t alone, and Karmen was so much fun. She always planned our days. We’d go to Starbucks and shop, or we’d rent a room at the Mondrian so we could spend the day at their pool flirting with celebrities and showing off our new Chiarugi bikinis that we’d bought each other. That was this cool element Karmen introduced into our shopping. We’d be having iced cappuccinos by my pool and she’d lean forward looking at me with her big brown eyes. “Today is going to be robe day.”

That meant we’d head to Montana Avenue and split up, the goal being to buy each other the most perfect robe we could find, or it might be dress day, which I dreaded a little because Karmen’s taste in dresses ran to Gaultier, while I was more an Armani Priv
é
kind of girl. But she was always so happy when I’d put on one of Gaultier’s bright-colored leather monstrosities she’d bought for me to go out dancing with her that I wore them.

As for what she did with my choices, I think she resold them. Karmen didn’t have an actual trust fund. She was on a weird kind of monthly allowance with her dad and sometimes she needed cash.

Karmen’s dad had a decent amount of money, a few hundred million dollars, and he’d made it in a short amount of time, but being a self-made guy, he ran kind of hot and cold as to how he handled his kid’s money. Sometimes he would be crazy generous, like with Karmen’s Maserati, but he didn’t buy any of them houses. When Karmen and her brothers turned twenty-one, he booted them off of his Bel Air estate and bought each of them condos.

Karmen’s was a small decent one bedroom on Charleville Boulevard in Beverly Hills. She had asked for one at the new Carlyle on Wilshire, but her dad had told her that if she wanted a three million dollar place, she should consider gainful employment. Karmen’s dad and she were pretty close, but he was no pushover and had already cut her off twice by the time she and I met. Her father was a big believer in rehab, like my parents, but in Karmen’s case it was necessary. Both times she had been cut off financially, she’d ended up at Promises in Malibu, but she had been so far gone that she had to go to detox over at Cedars first.

Obviously we were spending our time at my place where there was space and privacy, and besides, Diana was there. I liked to be able to see her and to go into her perfect nursery and give her the new outfits I bought her, and then have her brought out by her nanny so I could take pictures of her in them.

The night I burned the house down, Karmen and I had had our first fight.

She was pushing for us to go public. She wanted me to call up my parents and announce I was a lesbian so that, “You don’t have to keep living a lie”. There were so many reasons why that was a bad idea that I didn’t even know how to start explaining to her.

I gave her one of them. “I can’t. First of all, I don’t call my parents, they call me, and very seldom. When they do call, it’s usually because I fucked up. I don’t have a relationship with my parents. I’ve never had one with my mother and Daddy hates me since Vanity Fair, so no, I’m not going to call them up just to give them one more reason to be disappointed in me.”

She pushed out her lips and drained her scotch, her expression growing dark. “Okay Carey coward, Carey in the closet. If you won’t tell your family about us, then I want you to take me to Milan’s housewarming as your date.”

I kept my face smooth but I was dying inside.

Milan had finally made enough money to buy her very own movie star palace. She acted casually about it to everyone, but Christy and I knew what it meant to her and what she had given up to get there, little things like acceptance into the world we’d been born into and the chance to marry one of our own kind and have a family of her own. She was world famous and on show twenty-four seven, and running every minute of that time to hold her place because it’s slippery as hell at the top and, nowadays, being there usually means the kind of magazine covers screaming headlines you’d rather not have your name associated with, sweet little stories like 'Milan Marin in three way sex scandal with John Mayer.'

That hadn’t been true but it had cost her an engagement to the only son of Greece’s richest families. His parents did not want that kind of daughter-in-law, or even one who was innocent but drew such sordid publicity. So for Milan, the house she’d bought herself was both a triumph and a validation that, though it might be lonely at the top, the view is fucking great.