She also never refused me permission to go to the library, which I frequented and in which I spent a good deal of time.
Indeed, the only semi-motherly woman in my life was a librarian named Donna, who not only shared my love of books, but who read in me why they were so important.
It was not her job to look after me and give me the love I didn’t have.
But she did her best, and it was she who was sitting beside me in the audience when I won my Emmys. And it was her name in the front of We Pluck the Cord, because it was dedicated to her.
It was also she who was buried with a first edition, the first one I signed, of that book folded in her hands and my National Book Award medallion resting on her chest.
As I grew up, my mother complained about me in a way that was both constant and consistent, but it too was negligent. An aside. A nuisance.
She did not like me dragging on her time. She did not like me dragging on her resources.
I remember with an alarming clarity the day she came home with her first pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes, a pair she’d found at a consignment store.
I remember how she put them on, traipsed around the house admiring them, and as if talking to herself, not even glancing at me, which was how she always did it, she said, “I can’t wait until you’re gone. I’ll have the money to buy more of these. Next, I’m getting Chanel.”
I also remember those times I was meant to disappear.
Not literally, but as close as I could get.
“I’m probably going to be bringing someone home tonight, Delphine, and you do not exist. You hear me?”
I’d learned what she meant when, in the beginning, I’d had no idea what she meant and inadvertently existed when I wasn’t supposed to, and her negligent abuse became much more focused.
What she meant was that I was not to do that first thing to be a discoverable presence in our home when she brought a man there to fuck him. She was an attractive, single, unencumbered professional, and I was not to belie that.
Eventually, she’d learned, if there was one she might want to keep, this wasn’t the way to play it. Men, understandably, were not fond of finding out at the third hour that the woman they were banging, a woman they were thinking they might want to spend more time with, had a kid—and she’d hidden that.
In this time, I would find there was an irregularity in my mother’s behavior.
She’d had three men in her life who she also introduced into mine. The irregularity was that they were all good men, and I knew that because I still had relationships with all three. All of them reaching out to me when I found fame and fortune, doing it in a genuine, proud, not-quite-fatherly but definitely affectionate way.
I still had them when she did not have any of them.
But as an animal, I’d learned to adapt to my circumstances.
TV.
Books.
Fantasies.
Dreams of escape.
Making plans for a better life.
Puzzling out the pieces of everyone who came into my orbit.
And total shut down.
I did not like to hear my mother, who was loud during sex, having said sex.
Mostly, I did not like having a mother who not only wished I was not alive, not only told me at times to pretend I wasn’t alive, but was oblivious to the fact I was so very good at it.
I didn’t even get a pat on the head for doing what she asked.
I left home at eighteen with five hundred dollars in my pocket, but long before that I’d been living a separate life to my mother.
Those Years debuted when I was twenty-two.
Once it did, it was impossible for me to disappear.
But there were still times when I’d done it.
For instance, when my friend Isabella came over. She was starring in a movie with Warren. And she told me she’d walked in on him fucking his PA in his trailer. Everything about her screamed she hated saying it, but as a friend she couldn’t not, so I believed it.
Then he’d come home, and I’d confronted him, and he’d denied it, then admitted it, then denied it had happened before while he was married to me, and everything about him screamed he was lying.
I’d shut down then. Warren said later he thought he’d have to call a doctor to admit me to a hospital. I was completely non-responsive, walking around like an automaton.
And then it happened again, when an irate female percussionist in Angelo’s band was fired because he was done screwing her, and she wasn’t happy about that, and she reached out and told me he was fucking his way through his latest tour. She also shared that I should know he did that his last tour, during which he’d been married to me.
I’d had time in with Angelo (unlike Warren). I’d been older and wiser when I married him (I thought), and it wasn’t that I didn’t love Warren, it was just that I realized I’d been too young to make that kind of commitment with him.
With Angelo, it was different.
I’d loved him sensibly. I’d loved him sincerely.
But I’d also loved him deeply.
Therefore, in a fit of self-preservation, I’d first confronted the tour manager, who’d predictably and complicitly lied.
Then I’d taken it to Angelo, who had done the same, but it was half-hearted. The jig was up. He knew with my history with my mother that I’d adapted by fitting puzzle pieces together so I’d never read a situation unclearly and put myself in positions that were worse than I was accustomed to.
That was, I did this except with the two men in my life, both having been able to successfully hold important pieces from me until I was in too deep to protect myself from the pain (enter a decade and a half of celibacy).
I’d shut down with Angelo too, but I’d told Angelo how I used to do that and why.
Therefore, he’d led me to our bed and held me until he could get me to snap out of it.
That was the last time we laid together. The last time he held me.
He’d eventually claimed sex addition.
I’d filed for divorce.
And the last I’d shut down was the last I’d been in her presence.
It was Christmas four years ago.
My mother had nagged an invitation for her and her husband to share the holiday with us. The girls were not keen. Although they’d formed an uneasy relationship with their grandfather, they had zero tolerance for my mom.
She was retired. Going on cruises. There was some tour of Scandinavia they were considering. During a trip to New York City, she’d seen Carolina Herrera at Sotheby’s.
She’d married a year or so after I left.
I had not been invited to the wedding.
Her husband sat in my living room by the Christmas tree, staring off into space, and that flipped some switch in me.
Because she was so pathologically self-involved, he’d now been conditioned to live a life as I’d learned to be.
Invisible.
And she was being self-involved then. Talking to us about things we didn’t care about because we didn’t care about her, not letting anyone else speak.
Being there at all when she’d done not one thing in her life to be welcome there.
It was Camille who shook me out of it. As usual, I hadn’t known I was doing it.
It wasn’t as if I slipped into catatonia. I did not speak, but I went through the motions.
When I came back, I saw how alarmed my daughter was, which alarmed me.
After my mother was gone, Fenn had declared, “That bitch is never coming back.”